1,268 words.
I recently delivered a speech at Cultural Futurist Salon VIII. I have been informed that none of it was recorded, so while I work on recording it myself you can see the remarks below.
I recently visited New York and spent some time in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, one of the great galleries. Gushing to my online community of wealthy and unemployable schizos, this predictably inspired a debate on the nature of postmodern art, fringe galleries, and as some would describe it, the negative value of a smashed and pissed upon lightbulb in the middle of a room given an ironic title. “My kid could paint that,” they might say, albeit expressed more threateningly.
The criticism follows that there’s real art – meaning romanticist paintings and baroque sculptures and the like – and then there is whatever we are doing now, which is obviously degeneracy and intellectual decay.
I disagree, but I think to appreciate it you must inhabit art and swim in its pure context. Most people have no interest in that.
I’ve heard defenses of this thing called art that justify its value by how it impacts you emotionally; that it needs no explanation other than some feeling that remains with you after you beheld it. I find this reductive, as the search for meaning is essential to understanding creative work of any kind. The creator’s intent is essential, as is the message screaming out for attention. There has to be a difference between a masterwork and a chemical train derailment.
I prefer to say that modern art can only be enjoyed with at least an awareness of classical art, meaning one must understand that it exists as a contrast. The former is a reaction to the latter, part of an ongoing conversation, but it should not necessarily be seen as hostile critique. Modern art is best understood within the context of its surroundings within an art gallery, or its proximity to the history of art all surrounding it. The lights that illuminate these works emanate from the bulbs of history, geography, and curiosity more than any gilded certificates of media literacy.
Art is not passive; it is created by ludicrous people, it yearns alarmingly to be understood, and you must immerse yourself in its entire dimension of dominion to truly understand it. The living ecosystem of art – its historical and contemporary forms gathered and organized for coherency in so many temples – is the sum of all human trauma, expressed as a revolutionary pure context that reveals itself to people who are willing to understand it. It is inhabitable, and you can interface with entities you encounter there. You can bring things back.
This is why art is remarkable the less realistic it becomes, with its attempts to capture something only a human perception can apprehend. If done correctly, it would appear utterly threatening to an extraterrestrial.
If Andy Warhol cannot be appreciated on the basis of technique, he must be appreciated in the context of both his geographic and historical period, and more broadly the entire history of creation it is intended to be held against. You must know what it is a successful reaction against. It demands to be blanketed by your participation.
I know you didn’t just tune in to hear me talk about the type of art everyone hates; trust me, I’m going to get weird.
What I am describing is an essential element that most other politics are missing; they get so imprisoned in the technics of propaganda they forget to generate anything from the yearning of their soul. Their ideology thereby becomes a mansion for demons in form of spreadsheets.
Rather than political trauma that endeavors only to virally spread and annihilate itself in a progressive ouroboros – the end result of most Leftist ideologies – this interplay is an inhabitable dimension existing in violent opposition to those entropic forces that otherwise foster nihilism. It stands apart from materialist machinations: it is a dimension of pure humanity.
Available only to those who are willing to open themselves to utopia.
In my view, the essence of futurism is to generate a politics that rises to the technology of the era, and it’s no coincidence that Futurism of the Past is synonymous with a great aesthetic anchor. It is impossible to separate the futurist political movement from the explosive energy of its artistic form at its inception.
I am reminded of Marinetti’s anecdotes included in his Futurist Manifesto, explaining his inspiration occurring while travelling on a speeding train. Something was triggered deep within of him that allowed him a fleeting glimpse into the future: a politic of speed, and its implied violence, incarnate. There is a notion that technological upheavals completely disrupt not only the economic status quo but psychological paradigms, causing great unease with the populace. The train once traumatized its passengers, we are told.
Many corridors in the labyrinth of Leftist thought are built on this concept of trauma, and this idea constitutes much of psychoanalysis. You see wild flights such as the book “Spinal Catastrophism,” which is all about how our spines – and indeed our entire bodies – have evolved to predict and escape trauma inflicted on us by a hateful universe. Indeed, our entire existence as highly evolved forms are in reaction to trauma, driving us into a chain of paradigms where we eventually dominate the universe as total embodied violence revolting against itself.
It’s a ridiculous book, but it got me thinking a lot about the concept of trauma, even whether or not it exists as we have been led to understand. I know many people will cite challenges to the Freudian view and say trauma is something we can simply choose to overcome rather than imprison ourselves there through incessant interrogation.
Anyway, the dialectical tension between these two perspectives got me thinking of trauma as the unrequested hostility that impacts us and drives us forward. It is metaphysically tied to the negative while existing in the broader category of memories we can choose to succumb to or overcome. This is what both art and politics seeks to solve, one from the direction of materialism and conflict and the other from something approximating metaphysics. What works best is when both approaches are working in tandem.
Revolutions are traumatic. They never leave us even if they are ultimately defeated, and we end up reliving them again and again as they are mythologized in retrospect. I recall walking around Paris and beholding artifacts of the French Revolution stamped upon architecture, even with Napoleon he was attempting to imperialize the sentiment behind what drove the Jacobins while reigning in its violent excesses. But France never excised liberté, égalité, fraternité, and it never will. So often we attempt to recreate these violent movements in our present day, even the ones we renounce guide our immediate geopolitical actions.
Revolutions traumatize the civilizations that generate them, and they are appropriated into the dimension of art to live on forevermore as the echoes that permit us to echolocate our way through the darkness.
Art is how we grasp at the symmetry of eternity; trauma is the palette we wield to map it onto the world. While we have no power to curate what is collated into our collective consciousness, we can control it in the artistic realm.
The dimension of art is the reflection of the dimension of trauma. One is a memory we either choose to reject to inhabit while manifesting in the real world, the other is our own soul’s warnings we either reject or inhabit to manifest in the real world. Can these dimensions overlap? This is where true revolution sits.
Ideology is how you organize action in the material realm, geopolitics is how you survive in a matrix of complex systems, but art is how you capture humanity and project it across time. It is how we gather the essence we wish to recapture through technics and praxis; it is the only effective conduit through which to transmit our soul across time. That’s the root of this entire thing: drilling through the discourse and the noise, the vibes and the elite theory, competing systems of universal proclamations, and discovering the Heartland of the Real.
The spirited trauma of what we must harness in our endeavors intersects art and politics, unified by a positive vision. This vision will be situationally relevant, contextually innovative, and exciting to those curious souls who are tapped into the realm of creative dynamism. It will not be propaganda posters and corporate mantras expressed with supreme irony. It will not grope for historical narratives. It will not be a gilded time machine that becomes a time capsule some later generation can amuse itself with. “Look, they tried to do Cubism Rome,” they might say.
This is how to avoid the irony of futurism becoming locked in an early 20th century model, which is a trench the majority of those who title themselves futurists are currently stalled in. This thing ought not simply seek to replicate exciting 45-degree angles smattered with the commoditized vigor of our ancestors. It is easy to fall into lust with the ideology behind the art in question rather than the art itself; do you appreciate it, or does it speak to you? Or is it just that it seems like an antithesis to something you hate?
The soul we will harness to chart a course onward will unite art and politics, the nervous system weaving together a vision that demands utopian boldness. The political cannot be actioned without an artistic self-awareness of what we truly desire.
If futurism does not arrive from the future upon a bullet train of yearning, with the goal of exerting unimaginable traumas on the haunted noosphere of the status quo, it is simply discourse as aesthetics as a plantation. That’s what this means to me, and why I am speaking on Futurism affirmatively even though I once called Marinetti gay and cringe.
Thank you.